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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Pure Storage FlashArray comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.0
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers cost savings, efficiency, and scalability, reducing expenses by up to 30% annually for users.
Sentiment score
7.8
Pure Storage FlashArray enhances efficiency, lowers costs, and boosts ROI with simple management, data reduction, and evergreen updates.
In the long term, spanning three to five years, the total cost of ownership becomes cheaper, considering power consumption, data center footprint, and NVMe technology usage.
We have seen a return on investment as the solution has reduced resource requirements, allowing less experienced personnel to manage the storage.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.1
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's support is highly praised for quick, skilled, and effective assistance, deemed worth the cost by users.
Sentiment score
8.7
Pure Storage FlashArray is praised for excellent, responsive customer support, offering swift issue resolution and proactive problem identification.
Pure's support organization is responsive with minimal bureaucracy, making support a key factor in customer retention.
The support from Pure Storage is excellent.
Opening a case with Pure is a smooth process, and they prove to be reliable, even in severe cases where infrastructure issues arise.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers seamless scalability, easy expansion, and adaptability, making it ideal for enterprises despite cost considerations.
Sentiment score
7.8
Pure Storage FlashArray offers seamless scalability, ease of upgrades, and efficient storage, satisfying diverse enterprise needs with flexible growth options.
A big banking client had around 300 petabytes of data on Pure Storage.
The solution is highly scalable, particularly when there is a need to expand capacity.
I rate FlashArray's scalability nine out of 10.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is praised for its stability, reliability, minimal downtime, and efficient support, making it a dependable platform.
Sentiment score
8.0
Pure Storage FlashArray is praised for its stability, reliability, 100% uptime, and efficient support with minimal downtime issues.
Compared to VM, we find it most stable.
Stability has never been an issue except for minor controller glitches causing failover events, similar to brakes and tires on a car.
I encountered instances where the entire cluster went down due to workload and throughput issues.
I have not encountered any significant issues, such as applying firmware that introduces bugs.
 

Room For Improvement

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure needs improvements in pricing transparency, setup, performance, integrations, automation, licensing, and system compatibility.
Pure Storage FlashArray needs improvements in scalability, cloud integration, user controls, pricing, and compatibility with VMware and third-party environments.
We hope Nutanix can integrate inside our current license module.
Storing cold data on expensive arrays doesn't make financial sense, and tiering to any of the big three cloud providers would be advantageous.
Integrating object storage into the FlashArray would benefit entry-level and SMB customers by offering a more unified solution.
NetApp also delivers security, ransomware protection, and scale-up capabilities more effectively.
 

Setup Cost

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure provides cost-effective licensing options with free hypervisor, reducing TCO compared to traditional systems.
Pure Storage FlashArray is costly but valued for performance, all-inclusive features, and efficiency-enhancing Evergreen upgrades.
The pricing is renewed every year, at almost $100,000 per year.
They're expensive.
The cost of Pure FlashArray is a bit high compared to peers, but its sustainability and features justify the price.
Despite having various series, the entry costs can remain high.
 

Valuable Features

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers high performance, ease of use, scalability, and cost efficiency, benefiting smaller IT teams.
Pure Storage FlashArray offers fast, user-friendly data management with exceptional performance, scalability, and integration, ensuring efficient and reliable operations.
The replication method between Nutanix clusters is a valuable feature.
The best features of Pure Storage are their support and analytics.
The snapshot and replication capabilities of the arrays improved disaster recovery and data protection in events like ransomware attacks, enabling us to revert to good datasets without complete data loss.
Another noteworthy aspect is their platform, Pure One, a cloud-based analytics platform that automatically creates a case and sends out a part if a disk or controller fails.
 

Categories and Ranking

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
197
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (4th), HCI (3rd), Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) (1st), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (4th)
Pure Storage FlashArray
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
199
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is designed for HCI and holds a mindshare of 8.6%, up 8.5% compared to last year.
Pure Storage FlashArray, on the other hand, focuses on All-Flash Storage, holds 6.3% mindshare, down 8.1% since last year.
HCI
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

MahendraPanchotiya - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a unified platform, reduces downtime, and simple updates
Nutanix offers a unified platform for managing databases, virtual machines, and applications. This simplifies management by consolidating everything into a single interface. While Nutanix may have a higher upfront cost compared to other hypervisors, it can significantly reduce the resources needed for infrastructure management. With our previous hypervisor, we needed nearly ten IT personnel. Nutanix has allowed us to streamline our team to just three members. We use a combination of database technologies, including SQL databases and web servers such as IIS, BHP, and NGINX. Nutanix features helped our organization reduce downtime. I don't recall the last time we had downtime related to Nutanix because it is such a stable product. Nutanix, a reliable product, helps us streamline our processes, which in turn improves company revenue. We began to see the benefits after two years, with a 40 percent reduction in operational costs. We migrated 200 servers from AWS to Nutanix. Nutanix may not consolidate applications, but it helps us run them more efficiently on its platform. Updating is simple with one click. I would rate the updating processes 10 out of 10. Adding compute and storage on demand is not difficult. However, we need to factor in the existing and new firmware and software requirements.
Nabeel Sayegh - PeerSpot reviewer
Supercharges enterprise storage by way of highly optimized hardware, comprehensive data management and a feature rich interface.
During their early years, I was a member of Pure's Customer Advisory Board. In addition, when we first adopted Pure, they did not have replication GA yet. We got into their beta testing program and help them work out certain issues with that technology. One weakness I can say the array has, still to this day, is limited control on scheduling snapshots. Depending on the type of replication schedule you are building, you may or may not have control on specifying the start time of a given replication schedule. This is not a very big problem in the grand scheme of things, but something nonetheless that has bothered me about the scheduler in general. Another area for improvement would be automatic host alias creation. Other platforms such as EMC Unity/PowerStore will automatically detect the host name, create a alias for it and associate the logged in HBA's to it. Pure does not do this for you and as a result, requires manual configuration. This can be very time consuming especially when you are deploying a large number of new servers.
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which HCI solutions are best for your needs.
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Comparison Review

it_user244362 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 30, 2015
Nutanix vs. VMware EVO:RAIL vs. FlexPod
Originally posted at www.storagegaga.com/dont-get-too-drunk-on-hyper-converged/ I hate the fact that I am bursting the big bubble brewing about Hyper Convergence (HC). I urge all to look past the hot air and hype frenzy that are going on, because in the end, the HC platforms have to be aligned…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
38%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
32%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is the biggest difference between Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSphere?
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...
How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?
Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from core to edge and multi-cloud environments. It helps IT and OT teams deploy hyper...
Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...
Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Storage. It may be more expensive, but it should pay for itself for its functionalit...
What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashArray?
We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
The cost of Pure Storage is subjective and determined by your environment. Pure Storage tends to be more expensive than NetApp, but it is cheaper than EMC. Performance varies with data workload, ma...
 

Also Known As

Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.
Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. Pure Storage FlashArray and other solutions. Updated: January 2023.
850,671 professionals have used our research since 2012.